Vol. XLII No. 19 May 13, 2018
Array

Green Berets & ‘White Helmets’ are All Participants In Imperial Wars in the Middle East

B Arjun

A FRESH round of imperialist bloodletting is on the cards in the Middle-East. They caused complete destruction of Fallujah in Iraq, they bombed hospitals in Afghanistan, and virtually flattened Mosul and Raqqa in Iraq and Syria.Trump and Netanyahu, backed by a set of reactionary monarchical Arab regimes, is out to devour one more nation to feed its insatiable imperial appetite.The US-Israeli war drive against Iran has assumed dangerous proportions.

 According to the UN's secretary general the Middle East is "in chaos" and the Cold War is "back with a vengeance". The Trump-Netanyahu combo wants to blow up the 2015 Iranian nuclear accord. Under the agreement, Iran accepted to redesign, convert, and reduce its nuclear facilities while agreeing to inspections in return for an end to all economic sanctions.Trump, wants sanctions to be waived only if Iran agrees for greater curtailment of its nuclear ambitions. He wants to curb Iran’s access to ballistic missiles. Iran has warned the US that abandoning the nuclear deal would be a "historic mistake." Many European leaders are also against quashing the deal but all suggestions and recommendations to salvage the agreement are falling on deaf ears.

The dirty-duo is indulging in theatrical performances to prove that Iran has violated the terms of the nuclear agreement. The irony is that Israel that illegally holds nuclear weapons is talking of Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. It is sheer mockery of international norms that Israel a non-signatory to the NPT is standing up to accuse a State that is a member of the NPT.  But such is the hold of Jewish lobby in America that Netanyahu and Trump can speak lie after lie with impunity.

According to Asgar Mitha, the “American nation has morphed into a destructive empire fed by the neocon lies and foreign policies formulated by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 1997 that has included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz among the 25 people responsible for the founding principles.” John Bolton who held several national security posts in both Bush administrations, replaced HR McMaster as the national security adviser in early April. According to some analysts “Bolton’s bellicosity has catapulted him into the most important foreign policy position in the White House.” Incidentally, last month, United States, France and the United Kingdom launched 105 cruise missiles at Syria, giving yet another false pretext of chemical weapons attack by President Bashar al-Assad’s force.

THE HYBRID WAR

Washington’s protracted war in the Middle East launched at the end of the Cold War has shattered regional and global peace. The US has engineered a perfect paradigm for civil war in the region. “The civil war is intended to provide a wall of security for the state of Israel” and make profits for the American military industrial complex. On one hand, America supports Shias in Iraq and some Arab states; on the other hand it encourages Saudi Arabia to form a Sunni coalition. It has added a fresh dimension to its lethal arsenal by spearheading Hybrid War, which basically stands for externally provoked identity conflicts (ethnic, religious, regional, political, etc) within a targeted transit state.The coloured revolutions that CIA launched in various parts of the Middle-East have now transformed to unconventional wars to destabilise country after country.

The US military has perfected the hybrid warfare techniques that they learnt in Afghanistan when they used the Taliban to counter the Soviets. Syria offers a perfect example of how Washington is using Hybrid War to achieve its military objectives. The seven-year-old war for regime change in Syria is being fought by US and its allies by fomenting instability in its domestic affairs; giving overt and covert support to opposition groups. Spreading disinformation through black propaganda and encouraging criminal activity has been the hallmark of American hybrid wars.

America has also used the covert deployment of their regular troops. Recently The New York Times has reported that US Special Forces – Green Berets are clandestinely operating in Yemen, supporting the genocidal war that Saudi Arabia has unleashed on the Yemeni people. For long, America has been denying any direct involvement of its troops in Yemen, however the latest revelation has shown that not only is it providing Riyadh with weapons, and intelligence inputs but it is also directly fighting the war. The Yemen war which began in 2015 has consumed the lives of thousands of people. The war is a larger part of the geopolitical game and took over the capital, Sanaa.The US has ensured that the crisis has escalated into a multi-sided war, aiding the growth of al-Qaeda and ISIS.

There are more than 2,000 US troops presently deployed inside Syria. However, one of the important elements of Hybrid War is use of unmarked troops. If Green Berets represent the regular US forces, then ‘White Helmets’ officially known as the Syria Civil Defence is their undercover agents masquerading as rescue force. The United States has provided over $33 million to the ‘White Helmets’ since 2013. According to Max Blumenthal,‘The White Helmets were founded in collaboration with USAID’s Office of Transitional Initiatives – the wing that has promoted regime change around the world. USAID supplies the White Helmets through Chemonics, a for-profit contractor based in Washington DC that has become notorious for wasteful aid imbroglios from Haiti to Afghanistan.’ 

The White Helmets were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2016. The documentary film "Last Men in Aleppo," was nominated for the Oscar award. Netflix has recently released a special ‘documentary’ movie about the White Helmets. The group was the cover story of Time, in October 2016

The Western aggressors of Syria love the group and celebrate its so-called ‘life saving’ work. The Russian government, calls the White Helmets "terrorists," and accuses them of staging recent chemical attacks in Syria. Not only Russia but the former Pink Floyd Roger Waters has called the White Helmets as “a fake organisation that exists only to create propaganda for the jihadists and terrorists”. The liberal Western media that stands shoulder to shoulder with the war-mongering conservatives has shamelessly called Roger Waters as “conspiracist crank”. It is shocking the way The Guardian newspaper has been supporting the White Helmets and the imperialist war in Syria. The same Guardian also reports that Trump and his team “hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal.” Now if dirty tricks are so brazenly employed within America to defeat opposition then it is hard to believe that such nefarious activities are not a part of American set-up in war-torn Syria? The liberal Western journalists must ask as to why are the US and UK governments supplying funds to White Helmets? Why do the West have to interfere in every country? A conflict minus the Western interference has become unimaginable in modern world.

The Western liberals should ask for employment of humanitarian agencies to save Julian Assange’s life. A United Nations report has clearly indicated that Assange’s detention in Ecuadorean Embassy in London is illegal. The same UN group has highlighted the illegibility of Assange’s detention that had earlier influenced the release of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi and Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, who was held by Iran for 18 months. Yet, the WikiLeaks founder continues to remain confined within the embassy compound. The dubious human rights record of the West needs to be exposed. Let us try to have one West-free conflict in the world and see how far it goes and how many days it lasts. The US has blatantly used non-proliferation to support its interventionist policy. The world must develop as much aversion to the political use of nuclear weapons as it has for their military use. The political use of nuclear weapons by the United States has proved to be lethal for the Middle East region. War is a business, it’s a habit with the imperialist powers. It is imperative for global peace that the world keeps unipolarity in check and makes a smooth transition towards multipolarity.